9/21/2009 @ 12:00AM

The New Racism

During a wide-ranging interview with John King of CNN, President Barack Obama distanced himself from former President Jimmy Carter’s contention that the recent surge of opposition to big government is motivated by racism. Rather, the president observed that the debate over the size and scope of the federal government has been ferocious since the days of Andrew Jackson. And to his credit, he noted that harsh language has been used not just to condemn the partisans of government expansion, like FDR, who was also derided as a socialist, but also those who have called for reducing the size of government, like Ronald Reagan.

While Obama acknowledged that some of his detractors object to him on grounds of race, this sentiment is not, in his view, at the heart of the opposition to his spending initiatives. This strikes me as substantively right and politically shrewd, but it’s not the whole story.

During his 1976 presidential campaign, Carter caused considerable controversy for saying the following: “I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination.” After the sharp backlash from these remarks–according to Time, Jesse Jackson called Carter’s views “a throwback to Hitlerian racism”–the former president has spent much of his life calling others racists, including anti-tax conservatives and Israeli government officials. One can imagine that Carter derives a special satisfaction from taking the moral high ground. But though Carter has apologized endlessly for his remarks on the campaign trail, was he wrong to argue that our tendency to self-segregate, and to fear those who are different, is “a natural inclination”?

As the economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser noted in Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe, racial diversity seems to reduce the amount of redistribution. In northern European democracies, where racial diversity is a fairly new phenomenon, welfare states have tended to be very generous. Yet as rising immigration levels have changed the ethnic mix, native-born Europeans have in many cases called for curbing redistribution. Within the United States, the racially divided South redistributes far less than the more homogeneous states of the Upper Midwest.

Moreover, native-born white Americans have in recent decades tended to migrate from states that are immigrant magnets, like California and New York, to less diverse states in the interior. In political terms, they’ve been moving from liberal-leaning regions to conservative-leaning regions, in the process either scrambling or reinforcing partisan allegiances across the country. It should be obvious that race isn’t the only factor. The high cost of housing, heavy tax burdens and long commutes also play a role, particularly for young families.

But diversity does seem to contribute to what one might call a sense of unease. In 2007, the sociologist Robert Putnam found that residents of ethnically diverse neighborhoods “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends.” For adventurous young people, this lack of social intimacy is a good thing–the anonymity of urban life is part of its appeal. This is less likely to be true of nervous parents, keen to insulate their children from dangers real and perceived. The retreat to the suburbs and into the interior is at least in part a retreat from diversity.

One of the ironies of the new American racial landscape is that whites living in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods–many of whom are the aforementioned coastal refugees–are less likely to hold racist views than whites living in diverse neighborhoods, a phenomenon the sociologist Orlando Patterson described in his brilliant book The Ordeal of Integration. But is the fact that whites choosing to live in virtually all-white communities don’t have racist views very meaningful?

As John McWhorter recently argued in The New Republic, many whites who make unconscious negative assumptions about blacks will actually treat black people better than whites, sometimes very ostentatiously, perhaps as a way to compensate for a sense of racial guilt. Or consider how employers who hold racist views of native-born black Americans will often hold very positive views of black immigrants and their children, a stance that Malcolm Gladwell memorably described as “multicultural racism.” In theory, both of these strange phenomena might contribute to pro-Obama sentiment as much as straightforward racism might contribute to anti-Obama sentiment.

This new racism is subtler and in many respects less harmful than what came before it. It is also more durable. And Obama has decided, like many millions of African Americans who face formidable obstacles of their own, not to let it get in his way.

Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation. The co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, he writes a weekly column for Forbes.